Lee also shows us that a writer's creations do not always work the way he (consciously) intends them to. Asked to compare Spider-Man's first real girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, to Mary Jane Watson, Lee praises Gwen as an ideal woman and declares that she would have made "the perfect wife" for Peter. Yet he confesses that despite his efforts with Gwen, the readers preferred Mary Jane, whom he describes as "hip and cool." Perhaps the readers were right: Gwen was depicted as Lee's idea of the Perfect Girlfriend, coming off as rather two-dimensional, whereas Mary Jane, freed from the necessity of acting the moral paragon, had more sheer vitality as a character, and seemed more real. It's strange, then, that in the movies Mary Jane may have her comics namesake's acting and modeling career, but lacks her humor and "cool." It's as if Kirsten Dunst was really cast as Gwen; no wonder her hair gets blonder in the second movie.

I'm intrigued by Lee's own ambiguity towards the comics medium. He says that, yes, indeed, "I was intentionally trying to write the kind of stories that older readers would enjoy." In another perfect phrase, he sums up, "I tried to make them fairy tales for grownups." And yet shortly afterwards he confesses that "I always felt that I'd eventually get out of comics. I never felt it was a job for a grown man." Despite his achievements, he still feels this way, confirming one of the points that Raphael and Sturgeon make about him. Of course, DeFalco points out that Lee is still doing comics projects occasionally, and Lee good-humoredly agrees that despite his efforts to leave, he keeps being asked to do comics and probably will never get out of the business. (He does not quote Al Pacino in Godfather 3, but might as well have.)

The interview with John Romita that follows confirms some things I already had heard: that Mary Jane was visually modeled after Ann-Margret (though I didn't know Romita was specifically thinking of her in the movie Bye Bye Birdie), and that Lee and Ditko had disagreed over the true identity of the Green Goblin, who Ditko had wanted to be a nobody no one recognizes. (But Lee and Ditko had already done that with the unmasking of the Crime-Master!)

I had always assumed that when Romita succeeded Ditko as Spider-Man artist, a conscious decision was made to make Peter Parker look handsomer and more muscular. So it was a surprise to discover that this is yet another example of how the Spider-Man series evolved in a way that the creators did not consciously intend. Romita confesses that "I tried like crazy to make Peter look skinny and narrow-shouldered, but I just couldn't do it."

Again, I already knew that it was Romita who proposed killing off Gwen Stacy to shake up Spider-Man's status quo. But I hadn't known till this interview that Romita had been inspired by the unexpected death of the heroine Raven Sherman in Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates decades before. Caniff had with one stroke endowed the adventure comic strip with greater capacity for realism and a wider, darker emotional range; Gwen's death had a similar impact on superhero comics, as Gerry Conway's interview in this book emphasizes.

It's good to be reminded by Romita's interview that the comic books of the Golden and Silver Ages were influenced by adventure comic strips in their own classic period in the first half of the Twentieth Century, a body of work of which most contemporary comics pros and fans have little awareness. Romita credits Caniff's Dragon Lady, the memorable villainess from "Terry," as an inspiration for his visualization of the Kingpin's wife Vanessa.

Similarly, the movies of Hollywood's Golden Age were an influence on Romita, who explains that he modeled Gwen's father, Captain Stacy, on the craggy character actor Charles Bickford. It's intriguing to me that Romita partially based the Kingpin on another character actor, Edward Arnold, perhaps best known now as a corporate villain in Frank Capra's movies.

And I find it amusing that in designing the visuals for Daily Bugle editor Joe Robertson, Romita envisioned him as an ex-prizefighter. Romita reports that Lee ignored this; the moviemakers certainly didn't pick up on it, making their Robertson look rather out of shape.

I hadn't read that many interviews with Gerry Conway, Lee's first successor as writer of Amazing Spider-Man (not counting a short period when Roy Thomas substituted for Stan), so I was surprised by how intelligently analytical he can be.

Certainly, Conway pins down the difference between Stan Lee and the first two major writers to come to Marvel after the revolution he launched: Roy Thomas, a former teacher, and Denny O'Neil, a future teacher, both of whom were born in a period between Lee's "Greatest Generation" and the Baby Boomers like Conway. "Stan was something of a primitive," Conway accurately observes, "and I mean that in a good way &#Array; he worked from the gut, inspired by instinct. On the other hand, Roy and Denny were both intellectuals of a sort, and their work was more sophisticated. They brought a deeper historical and literary understanding to the material." This distinction is to a degree true of the Baby Boomer generation of writers whom Thomas would bring into Marvel: they saw the potential for building their own works of personal expression upon the imaginative foundation that Lee and his collaborators had laid.

Not only was Conway the first Boomer to write Spider-Man, but he reminds us that he was about the same age as Peter Parker at the time: still only nineteen! Boomers were growing up reading Silver Age Marvels in the 1960s and then taking over writing these very series in the 1970s.

Conway spends much of his interview discussing the death of Gwen Stacy, and, in particular, the mysterious snapping sound when Spider-Man caught the falling Gwen. Though this would not be made explicit in the comics for decades, the "snap" suggested that the impact of Spider-Man catching the fallen Gwen was what actually killed her. Even more directly than in the case of Uncle Ben, Spider-Man had inadvertently been responsible for the death of someone he loved.